hutton_d

Hmmmm. You've never been involved in any sort of software development then? The problem is that most software runs in what is called 'serial' mode. That is it does one thing, like read in some data, then the next, process that data, then another etc. So it does one thing after another thus only using one CPU. Or, in your case, one core - as they are the same thing in this case. To utilise more than one CPU with a single application it has to be written to be 'multi-threaded', that is it can do more than one thing at the same time. For instance, with video processing, it may work on a several viseo frames at once. Hopefully it'll figure out how many CPUs/cores you have and, in your case say, do 2 at once.

BUT the latter presupposes that the computation can be done in this 'parallel' mode. A lot of things have to be done in 'serial' mode thus will only ever use a single CPU at one time. In this case you can run two copies of the same application at once, assuming that this is appropriate in your case.

The other thing that happens is that whilst you are doing your 'CPU intensive' stuff on one CPU the other is being used, just not at 100% - it actually takes some serious processing to use 100% (like IE going nuts!!!!!! :-) ). Virus checking for example. Rather than hogging your CPU it'll use the 2nd CPU whilst you do real work on the other.

In reality, you may find a fast single CPU is adequate for your needs. But a lot of people today, and even more in the future as multi-threaded software becomes the norm, do need multi-cores. Believe me, the number of cores per socket will only increase

Dave - working on multi-core software for Intel .....

hutton_d

Quite right. But it'll be interesting to see how SW develops over the next few years as multi-core becomes all-pervasive. There will have to be more tools to help develop it for a start because multi-threading is bl**dy hard! Very easy to make mistakes that only show as, say, an occasional hang ....

But Intel already have an 80-core machine in the labs (public knowledge Intel pledges 80 cores in five years | CNET News.com "Intel's prototype uses 80 floating-point cores, each running at 3.16GHz, Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer, said in a speech following Otellini's address. In order to move data in between individual cores and into memory, the company plans to use an on-chip interconnect fabric and stacked SRAM (static RAM) chips attached directly to the bottom of the chip, he said" ..) so the technology isn't going away. People just have to learn how to utilise it effectively!

Dave